Video Essentials

Best Practices for Planning a Content Curation Strategy

It’s no news flash that there’s a lot of video online — far too much in any one area for interested viewers to tackle. That’s where a well-planned curation strategy comes in.

Curation can solve the problem of abundance online, Steven Rosenbaum, author of Curation Nation, explained at the recent Streaming Media East conference in New York City. While creative professionals occasionally disagree with curation, it’s a way for site owners to present strong material to site visitors and cut through the clutter.

“Content curators are distributors of collections,” explained Rosenbaum. “One of the reasons why this is a difficult talk to give to this audience is creators tend to see curation as stealing their soul. So, when you talk to people who make content for a living, whether it’s writers or photographers or videographers, it’s all, ‘Yeah, I used to have a great business back when all of this aggregation didn’t exist and now it’s hard for me to make a living.’ That’s not the curator’s fault. That’s the abundance problem. If you went ahead and made all the curators in the world go away, you’d still have this signal-to-noise problem that we laid out at the beginning of the talk. So, absolutely no way is curation the thing that is the enemy of creation.”

A well-planned content curation strategy doesn’t simply present a list of videos to site visitors. It presents a collection with personality. When curating materials to present, think about the persona that makes that collection unique.

“A lot of times, journalists in particular say ‘I don’t have a voice. I don’t want to have a voice. I want to be impartial. I want to be objective.’ What we’re suggesting is, in a world in which there are going to be a thousand people curating channels about the Corvette, and how to repair the ’67 Corvette, your ability to be either a guy from Jersey or a California Corvette creator — how you wrap the content with your voice and your point of view and your attitude and your style and your charm and your energy is the difference,” said Rosenbaum.

For more on planning a content curation strategy, watch the full video below.